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Over the past decades, Marxist-inspired approaches from the field of International Historical Sociology (IHS) have theorised the relationship between 16th and 17th Century European colonial expansion and the development of relations of production and economic growth on both sides of the Atlantic. In this article, we argue that such attempts--from Dependency Theory (DT), World-Systems Theory (WST), and Uneven and Combined Development (UCD)--are premised on a structuralist perspective which overextend the notion of capitalism and under examine the sphere of production, rendering divergent and distinct strategies of European colonialism a homogenous and under-historicised process. Embracing theoretical innovations from Geopolitical Marxism (GPM), we dispute this unitary logic of expansion, instead applying a radical historicist methodology to demonstrate that British and Spanish colonial strategies in the Americas (intra-imperial free trade vs. mercantilism) were shaped by nationally specific class relations (capitalism vs. feudalism/absolutism), generating unique patterns of settlement on the ground (mineral extraction vs. cash-crop production). Promoting historicism thus allows Marxist International Relations to better recognise 'the 'making of' the international order' during the period of European colonial expansion from the 16th century onwards, and, in doing so, further understand its enduring legacies. Keywords: colonialism, International Historical Sociology, Radical Historicism, foreign policy, International Political Economy., Introduction The disciplinary linkages between International Relations (IR) and Marxism may have historically suffered from a 'double neglect', especially in comparison to other social sciences, though this division is less [...]

Government infrastructure provision is much more important than its conception in mainstream economic theory as a response to 'market failure'. In practice, it draws on the state's capacity to fUnd [...]